One of the take-aways from the leporello book-dummy kit that I had received from the printer was some additional design tweaks to the cover. Two days ago I received a couple of samples of the revised cover design; I think a Winner is in the House!

To complete this dummy, I had to tip in the anticipated photograph for this cover, above, then glue in the leporello pages and simulate the interior cover page. One of the final design tweaks is to decide if I want to have the project and my name on the front cover or only printed on the spine. As it appears now, above, without text on the front cover, it appears to have a unobstructed look at one of my subjects, which I think is in alignment with my concept for this project. Now thinking, maybe add a paper belly band with the additional text?

I have some ideas of how to further strength the book design with some very minor tweaks and I am looking forward to meeting with my printer, Dual Graphics, at the LACP Spring event tomorrow.

So I am getting ready for my first show-n-tell with what I think is the final design (the presentation at PADA earlier this month was with the pending book design, and first book talk about the project) for this project. I have to pinch myself that I am on the edge of getting this project published after an intense year and half working on it. Since I am still considering a Kickstarter to raise the funds for printing, I will be taking names for the growing interest list again tomorrow.

Kinda weird holding this book dummy knowing that this could essentially be the first real example of the final intended book. The interior pages are still off the copy machine, so these pictures don’t look so great, but provides the look of what the leporello design will approximate. Lessons learned from an earlier book-dummy; use thin copy paper so that I don’t increase the depth of the interior to the point that it does not fit within the cover! This is getting really exciting.

So I am looking forward to my two LACP presentations tomorrow, a mini-seminar on Photo Book Pre-visualization and moderator for the Photo Book discussion panel on How to Get Your Photo Book Published, while getting some more feedback on this book and project.

Reminder: Let me know if you want to be placed on my growing interest list (doug@douglasstockdale.com) for Middle Ground. More news about the final price and fund raising campaign shortly!

You know that when you are self-publishing a new book you are getting very, very close to the final design when you receive a book-dummy kit from the printer, who in this case is Dual Graphics, in Brea. This is a leporello book-dummy kit, for Middle Ground.

The book-dummy kit is pretty basic; interior sheets that are made with the intended printing paper for the book’s publication, in my case a glossy paper (Verso Paper, Sterling Gloss, 100# book), one of the papers that I had included in my Guide to Self-Publishing an Indie Artist Book. Since this is a leporello book, each sheet has six pages plus a half-inch wide tab for binding (gluing). So I was able to take eleven of these interior sheets, glue these together in series and have an interior mock-up dummy completed for my book design. Nice.

There are also mock-ups of the book’s cover, which in my case is going to start with stiff-covers. After constructing the interior leporello dummy (above), it was apparent that we had not allowed enough for the width of the spine to accommodate for the thickness of this stack of paper. The interior sheets were hand creased and folded, so the on-press production process is going to provide a tighter and more compact stack of paper, nevertheless, I still need a bit more width for the spine.

The cover stock was still a bit on the light side, so since we need to redo the cover samples, the printer is going to provide a heavier stock (18 point) up to the maximum their presses can handle.

Another design tweak is to increase the size of the cover just a tiny bit more to allow a nicer interface with the interior leporello block, since these will be hand bound by me. I need to allow for a little more exterior coverage just in case.

At the moment, I need to complete the Middle Ground Book-dummy #4 for my presentation this weekend at LACP. As part of my book presentation, Photo Book Pre-Visualization, I will use this book dummy to illustrate my point. Also a chance to promote the pending publication and add to my interest list! Also, still time to sign up if you would like to join me at LACP this Saturday (March 17th).

Since Dual Graphic will also have a table this weekend at LACP, it will be a chance for me to work with the printer off-line as to how this book dummy is coming together and determine if we need to make any further design tweaks.

Busy, busy, busy! The fun just never ends!

Reminder: Let me know if you want to be placed on the now growing interest list (doug@douglasstockdale.com) for my Middle Ground limited edition artist book. If you can help me network for potential exhibitions (pop-up weekend, month long, what ever!), I would really, really appreciate that very much!! (expect this to part of my update to be repeated very often!)

At this point the realist side (aka the practical engineer) of my personality is kicking in. While I would really, really like to have a large commercial (trade) photobook of the leporello design published, I am not sure that I can obtain the financing for this book in advance of its printing. I have been thinking about a Kickstarter program to make the trade book happen and while that idea is still lurking, I am now working on a scaled down version of this project, both in book size and book quantity, that I can self-publish.

Which is leading to the development of my Middle Ground book dummy #4 that I hinted at earlier. The edit for this new dummy is a work in progress, see photo above. I have the maximized size of the book from the printer for a digital litho printed leporello book, essentially six pages per blank, with a small end tab for the binding process. The trim size is now 7-7/8″ wide x 6-1/2″ high. This will provide a very nice image size and when the leporello is fully opened, the pages will extend about 15 feet, still an impressive length.

To reduce the printing cost I have redesigned the book with one photograph per page (printed on front side only of the leporello), for a total page count of 66 pages from the previous 132 pages for the trade book. The main reason for the new edit is that instead of viewing one image at a time there will be two images per spread and I need to consider the interplay of the paired images. The overall sequence is thus slightly modified but I have the same visual intent of the progression.

For the revised photobook my intent now is to self-publish a limited edition artist book, with the edition size of 99 books, plus artist proofs and a few extra for advertising and display copies. To keep the costs in line, I will be performing the hand binding for the leporello, which means there are 11 glue joints that I need to perform to complete each book. To ensure that the leporello lays correctly, this will be a slow and tedious process, which means that the book cost will not really reflect that amount of my labor going into each book, but each book will be personal and probably a bit unique as a result. This book binding process will take a good bit of time, so I need to decide to do all of the binding before I start shipping or ship the books as I make them, probably a couple of books per day?

Let me know if you want to be placed on the now growing interest list (doug@douglasstockdale.com) for my Middle Ground book. If you can help me network for potential exhibitions (pop-up, weekend, month long), I would really, really appreciate that very much!! (expect this to part of my update to be repeated very often!)

When I found myself in the midst of developing the Middle Ground project, I also went into a book development phase. I know that a photobook of some sort was where I would eventually end up with one at least aspect of the project. I think that I just knew from the beginning that the nature of the urban landscape that I was documenting would lend itself to a leporello (accordion) book design.

So it was serendipitous that while attending a photographic exhibit in Santa Monica, I went into the Japanese paper store Hiromi Pape, that was then located in the same complex (since relocated to Culver City; awesome paper store!). While there I came across some Drihon Accordion style notebooks. Wow! A pre-made accordion book with blank pages that I could utilize to develop the book concept for my project.

Two were two great aspects of this pre-made book; first it was small enough (4″ w x 6-1/2″ h) that would allow me to carry it around for show-n-tell and second it allowed me to create an 8″ x 6-1/2″ page spread. By paper-clipping in the various images I could see how the sequence flow for the Middle Ground book design might work.

Thus was born my Middle Ground bookdummy PoC (Proof of Concept). For those with a scientific background, the idea of PoC is probably a very familiar term; the actualization of a theory or concept into some tangible that proves that this idea is feasible.

I have been carrying this around with me for the past six plus months, which is why the accompanying photographs show a rather beat up bookdummy. Nevertheless, it has been a great show-n-tell bookdummy as well as a wonderful little platform to test some book layout ideas.

Well today I just posted on Instagram the photo above revealing what my book commission is about that I have been working so diligently on for the past three weeks. Not that I was looking to write a how-to, but there are some side benefits to this project. I have been in a heavy writing, now editing mode in that this is going to be published sometime next in mid-October and I anticipate being launched at the Medium Festival in San Diego at the end of October.

The cover photograph of a stack of photobooks was photographed by Scott Mathews, which I will discuss a bit more next week when things calm down. Meanwhile, still in the midst of the heavy copy editing with my Text Editor Gerhard Clausing and getting a technical review of the pre-press, printing and binding text with Craig Evans at Dual Graphics. Sometimes the final editing gets a bit complicated as the various copy versions move back and forth between reviewers, so we are doing a final review of the whole thing today.

Making progress as the final copy should be heading to pre-press for loading into InDesign late today. Yes!

A couple of days ago I blogged about the working on the text formatting process for this book commission. In the meantime Craig and I worked out a text layout design and a method to work together on how to complete this aspect of the book.

While working on the rough edit of the text and in order to provide myself with a little breathing room while trying to solve some concerns I have about the flow of the narrative, I have started some editing of the text. Yes, the infamous red-lines! One aspect of doing the red-line edits is it provides a bit more clarity for this section, in this case the Introduction, while giving me some ideas of how to resolve where I had a bit of writers block.

The other aspect of starting the red-line edits is realizing that it is also time to bring someone on board as a final editor of this heavy text project. Thus my buddy Gerry Clausing, who besides being the Associate Editor for The PhotoBook Journal is now the Editor for the SoCal PhotoExchange, has agreed to help me out as a text editor. I hope to have something for him to start with by the middle of next week. I need to progress beyond a rough edit of this writing so that I do not drive him crazy.

Meanwhile I have another buddy, Scott Mathews, working in his studio on the various options for the photograph to use for the book’s cover image. More about that shortly.

At the end of last week I posted about having a better defined book dummy; a straw man for the amount of pages I might need and well into the process of using post-it notes to signify what attributes of this book commission were going to end up where in the book.

I also stated that I was writing like a wild man and I was pretty sure that no-one was going to be impressed by a photograph of my keyboard (if someone is, let me know!). Nevertheless, what I am writing at some point needs to land inside the book. So last night I met up with Craig Evans, a layout designer, who is going to convert my writing using InDesign into what will eventually become the printed page. So first thing this morning I received a PDF of 30 pages of writing in a potential text layout for this book. Concurrently I had used MS Publisher to create a test page with the two-column layout we had discussed and I had envisioned for this book. I needed to have an idea of what my word-count was going to be per page which would then help me know a little more about the page-count should be.

So in the photo above are the two pages side-by-side within the book dummy of these two versions, each with a slightly different size and style of font, as well as a slight difference in header and paragraph spacing. I suspect we are going to dicker over the text layout so more. Nevertheless, we agree on many of the layout aspects, but when printing a book, it is all in the details.

Meanwhile, I am back to writing the rough edit once again.

Interestingly I have the photographs that I am going to use in my notes and we are also discussing the size, location and what paper we are going to print these on. More on that probably next week as we are really flying towards the publication deadline. Yikes.

So if life is not crazy enough, I might be also looking to self-publish in 2017 my photobook Bluewater Shore, the second in my series of Holiday Snaps project (the first being Pine Lake). Honestly, this project took a little holiday when (1) it took a lot of energy to market and sell Pine Lake in 2014, (2) I did not have the investment funds to print it (even after I received a much better quote) and worse (3), I lost (okay it turns out I miss placed it) my completed book dummy for Bluewater Shore. After searching for this darn thing for almost six months I was feeling a bit deflated and although I had all of the pieces to build another dummy, I just did not feel like doing it.

Well that all changed yesterday, while looking for something else in back of my files I spied a little bit of baby blue; could it be?? Yep, there was my Bluewater Shore book dummy in the oddest of files.My bad. But finding this bookdummy was very, very nice!

So I have been back working on the digital files for the interior of this book today while confirming that the sequence that I developed two years ago still made sense. Yep, looking good! The nice thing about the conceptual intent for this narrative is that it is sequenced in a chronological order, much as you would go thru a roll of processed film after a holiday vacation, similar in narrative style of Pine Lake. Second, I now have the funds to go to print and complete that aspect. The limited edition is till going to be 100 copies, which I am still planning to hand bind and then personally inscribe each book. Since I do have all of the parts, maybe I can have this completed for the Spring book season, so stayed tuned if this artist book is of interest.

Oh, like Pine Lake, I am still thinking of adding a few little extras ;- )